HESFES

HESFES (Home Educators' Summer Festival) was an annual festival aimed at home educators and their families. Organised annually since 1998 by festival coordinator Andy Blewett with the assistance of a cooperative of volunteers mainly home educators themselves. The festival offered music, entertainment, crafts, life skills, technology, discussion, conferences and many other activities. HESFES was a friendly cooperative and most of the entertainment being family focused.
HESFES had grown from a small camp at Monkton Wylde farm, Charmouth, Dorset from 1998, 1999, moving onto a larger site at Manor Farm Charmouth, Dorset in 2000 - 2005.
In 2011, HESFES moved to a more central site in Suffolk, but it had used other sites since then. (page 36). More recently in 2015, it used the vast Pembrey Country Park in Carmarthenshire, Wales.
With a capacity of a maximum of 1500 participants,most activities took place in marquees. The festival offered various children's activities, which were exclusively designed to be educational or beneficial in some way (e.g. Circus skills, Science talks, Weaving, Football, Sports Day, Fabric painting and Music workshops). Another major part of the festival was live, and recorded, musical entertainment; including a children's disco. Parents benefited from various free workshops covering the law on home education, dealing with local authorities, rights of home educators and resources available to home educators and their children.
In 2016, HESFES was scheduled to take place from 21-28 July 2016 in Pembrey Country Park but unfortunately was cancelled.

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